1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to electronic mail and, more specifically, to virtual mail storage for mail distributed using corporate distribution lists.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail (email) has become a pervasive method for communication, especially in the corporate environment. Email allows for quick and seamless communication between sender and recipient whether they are located in the same building or overseas.
Email may be formatted according to widely accepted protocols, for example Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and routed, for example, over the internet, from sender to recipient.
Within the corporate environment, email may be managed by one or more mail servers. Mail servers may handle email transmission within the corporate environment, for example using proprietary protocols, and may be able to send and receive email over the internet, for example via a gateway that conforms the email to more widely accepted protocols. Users within such an environment may access the mail server via a mail client. For example, a proprietary mail server such as Microsoft Exchange Server (registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation) may be accessed using a Microsoft Outlook (registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation) mail client.
Email systems such as the Microsoft Exchange Server may store sent and received emails associated with each user in a database. The storage size of this database may be subject to physical limitations, such as the maximum storage capacity of the server computer that the mail server runs on. Additionally, the mail server may limit the database size regardless of the available storage space. For example, the mail server may limit the database to 16 gigabytes (GB).
As the use of email increases, corporations managing mail servers must find ways of accommodating and/or reducing the increased storage demands. One typical solution is to increase the available storage capacity by employing a scalable storage solution such as a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). Another typical solution is to upgrade the mail server to a more robust program that does not impose a database size limit. However, both of these options may be very expensive.
To further exacerbate the problem, the attachment of files such as documents, pictures, and executable binaries often results in greatly increased email size.
Email distribution lists may be used to simultaneously send the same email to multiple recipients. Mail clients often incorporate distribution list capabilities to allow users to easily send an email to a select group of people. While some distribution lists are limited to a relatively small number of people, for example a department or a work group, other distribution lists may be quite large. For example, it is common for a mail client to provide an “all employees” distribution list. As large multi-national corporations may have upwards of 30,000 employees, even a relatively small email may use substantial database resources as it is replicated to over 30,000 user mailboxes throughout the email system. For example, a 100 kilobyte (KB) email sent to 30,000 employees translates to approximately 3 GB of data on the database.
In addition to or instead of storing sent emails on server storage, users may move email to a local storage space. The local storage space may be a database maintained on the user's personal computer. For example, emails may be moved to a local PST file that contains a database of stored emails. While moving emails to local storage may reduce the burden on the server storage, the availability of local storage space may be similarly limited.
It is therefore desirable to reduce the storage space required to store emails sent over distribution lists.